Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen.

Yankee from Olympus: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Catherine Drinker Bowen
New York: Bantam Books
1960 (1943)

Why read it? Although this book concerns primarily Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., i.e. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, spends time in the first quarter of the book describing in colorful detail the grandfather, called Abiel, and Junior’s father, called Oliver or Dr. Holmes. The grandfather, Abiel, was a lawyer and Junior’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician.

It is a good thing that Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote this book. If the book had been written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., its contents would have been as obscure as his legal opinions and dissents were. Holmes loved to use metaphors, some of which were not all that clear, and his phrases and clauses were often convoluted. Or, perhaps it was his concise or cryptic use of words. He said that people manipulated words, that words were not as transparent as crystals, that they varied according to the times and context. He said that you had to look for the living thought behind the words. That’s how one has to read Justice Holmes: his words mask living thoughts and it is the thought that one must look for in Holmes’s opinions and dissents, beyond the words.

Although Justice Holmes was a student of law, he was also a student of life. He thought deeply about it and his words are often memorable. For example, here is his attitude toward death: “At the grave of a hero, we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”

I think my overall impression of Holmes’s life is that of his sense of purpose throughout his life. He appears not to have intentionally wasted a single day.

Sample ideas from the book:
ix “By his own confession, [OW, Jr.] Holmes was an ‘internal’ man, to whom ideas were more interesting than things.” “The [law] books seemed quite impossible to understand. The suspicion assailed him that if he ever did understand them, they would still be dull…. In its pages, one caught no glimpse of that subject which was the only thing worth studying in the world: Man.” 116 “What did surprise him [Wendell] was the attitude of his classmates toward the whole business of scholarship. They looked upon books as something to avoid.” 117 “The men who came to the Holmes house…never read a book because it was the thing to do. They read with passionate interest and with passionate interest discussed what they had read.” 117 “ ‘Read for ideas, not for authors,’ Wendell wrote.”

149 “At Fair Oaks the men charged with fixed bayonets across a field of mud, sinking knee-deep at every step.”150 “War was not chivalry. War was not gallantry, heroism, adventure. War was terrible and dull, and a man had better not try to make sense of it. A man had better just keep at it day by day, doing the next job that lay before him.” 152 “The longer he was in the war, the more Wendell Holmes was convinced that not death was the horror, but the loss of a young man’s chance to live. Never to have your chance, never to show the world—to show yourself what you could do!” 163 “…but Wendell could not forget. Dead men sprawled among the corn, naked, stripped of trousers and boots, eyes staring, limbs flung out in awful abandon. For these boots and trousers the Rebels had fought like tigers. If the North fought for “victory,” for “Union,” “freedom,” the South fought for shoes to put on its bleeding feet, pants for its legs, and fought no less bravely…. They [the Rebels] were not cowards.”

163 Wendell Holmes: “War? …. War is organized bore.” 164 “The surgeon…had told him men were divided into two kinds—external men and internal men. Internal men considered ideas more interesting than things…. The opposite, those robust creatures who acted and did not need to think…filled with health and a kind of blessed immediacy, a capacity for living in the present and the present only.” 178 “ ‘Get down, you fool!’ a young voice shouted. Automatically the President [Lincoln] stepped back. It was Wendell Holmes, angry and terrified…. ‘Captain,’ he [Lincoln] said, ‘I am glad you know how to talk to a civilian.’ ”180 “…Holmes recalled the first time he had tried to use his saber. Down at Edwards Ferry he had been sent on horseback to carry dispatches. On the road he met a Rebel captain. They tried to get their sabers out. Both got thoroughly tangled up, wheeled, drew their pistols, rode close and pressed the muzzle to the other’s side. Neither pistol went off. No one but a soldier would understand that story.”

199 OW Holmes on studying the law: “One found oneself plunged in a thick fog of details….” 246 OW Holmes: “The fact is…that legislation…is empirical. It is necessarily made a means by which a body, having the power, puts burdens which are disagreeable to them on the shoulders of someone else.” 256 “…he was saying that judicial decision does not derive wholly from precedent. He was saying that a good judge unconsciously predicates a law according to the result it will have upon the community at large.”

267 “Holmes approved the case system. Law only ends with a theory; it begins with a concrete case. Naturally, a students remembers an actual instance more vividly than a general principle.” 274 “Experience was what made a judge—not scholarship or theoretical conceptions of the judicial function.” 278 “A country that in Holmes’s youth had been rural in tone now rushed to build new cities. Jefferson’s fears had come to pass. Men lived piled upon one another, struggling for survival under smoking factory chimneys of which Jefferson could not have dreamed. By 1883, the transition from a rural to an industrial economy was gathering momentum; in the ‘90s the ills attending it would be acute.”

279 “The trouble was that the courts gave this working document [the Constitution] no elasticity; they regarded it as immutable, written in stone on Sinai” [allusion to the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai]. 279 “The Constitution is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” 291 “Lawyers were allowed two hours for oral arguments…. Holmes liked to decide from the oral argument, not wait for the brief. He went at it zestfully, as a man goes after game. The moment the lawyer started to speak, Holmes leaned forward, listening raptly, making penciled notes. Sometimes, five minutes were not gone when he threw himself back, closed his eyes. ‘Holmes has made up his mind.’ ”

339 “If the Northern Securities Company was proved, under the Sherman Act, to be in restraint of trade, it should be dissolved. If not, it should stand. All this pressure of public opinion served merely to cloud the issue.” 339 “If the public would come out frankly and say it desired to sock the rich, it would be, Holmes thought, far more admirable than this pretense of using the courts to call the rich illegal simply because they were rich.” 339 “As for the conscience of the court, a court that ruled according to its ‘conscience’ would be no court at all. Law was neither morality nor politics, nor expediency nor art.”

340 “Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgments.” 340 Reducing the issue to a simple comparison: “…as if the question were whether two small exporting grocers shall go to jail….”
343 “Moreover, it was not the number of his dissents that won for Holmes the title of the Great Dissenter…. It was the quality of Holmes’s dissents that made them famous; it was what he said and how he said it.” 343 “A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.” Charles Evans Hughes.

353 “…faith in a universe not measured by our fears….” 358 Holmes: “Moral conceptions don’t belong in a court of law.” 360 “Sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment have been imposed for the publishing of two leaflets that I believe the defendants had as much right to publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United States….” 361 “…the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas….”361 “…I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe….”

365 Holmes: “ ‘Delusive exactness’ is a source of fallacy throughout the law. By calling a business ‘property’ you make it seem like land.”373 “Often, Holmes had talked of life and death, saying…that life was action, the use of one’s powers.” 373 Holmes: “…if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.” 375 “With taxes a man buys civilization—by no means a bad bargain.” 376 “…the Court, it seemed to him, acted on their own economic theories—and then called upon the Constitution as a sanction.”

Quote: 399 Francis Biddle: “Holmes was skeptical of everything except for life itself.”

Quote: 386 “Time, events, history itself, would prove his dissents. One by one they became law.”

Quote: 387 “There was indeed a great contagion in this courage—a courage not born with Holmes but handed down with all the accumulated force, the deep spiritual persuasion, of the generations behind him.”